Lollapalooza emailed the complete festival schedule to its mailing list subscribers today, and although Perry has once again put together what looks like it will be a great festival, I want to bring your attention to another festival happening the same weekend, August 7th-9th. Now in it’s eleventh year the Wolfe Island Music Festival will once again feature festival favourites and big names like Holy Fuck, and the usual smattering of the local Kingston scene with acts like P.S. I Love You, The Rural Alberta Advantage who we’ve talked about before and a personal favourite of mine Ohbijou.

So if you’re low on funds, don’t want to drive the twelve hours from Toronto, or like me currently don’t have a passport, why not come down and camp on a beutiful rural island where lake Ontario meets the St. Lawrence seaway. It’s only a twenty minute free ferry-ride from downtown Kingston. This is the music festival equivalent of giving up the fast pace of the city for some relaxation in the country; you won’t have to rush between the stages (there’s only one), so you won’t miss a beat. Plus I plan to bring lots of wine to share.

Here’s a sampling of the festival’s performers to listen to while you plan your trip to the nation’s first capital:

Ohbijou – Black Ice from the recently released Beacons LP

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Woodhands – I Wasn’t Made for Fighting

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PS I Love You – 2012

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Full lineup after the jump…

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Angus and Julia Stone are a brother/sister group from the sunny northern suburbs of Sydney.  Originally they started out as separate artists who would play back up for each other at open mic nights.  From that humble background Angus and Julia slowly gained momentum and caught the attention of the alternative media in Australia and then the UK.  Using this momentum the recorded the album “A Book Like This” and released it in Australia in September 2007 and then in the UK in March 2008.

One of the things that make this duo unique is they both write songs independently of one another.  Because of this you get a wonderful variety in the album with songs written from different perspectives but with threads of common experiences holding it together.  What you end up with is a very listenable album that neither becomes predictable nor strays far from its roots.  This album plays like a summers day in a hammock with the surf breaking nearby.

The album was only recently released in North America (3rd March 2009) on Nettwerk.  Currently Angus and Julia are touring through the United States before they head back into the studio and I think we all should be holding our collective breaths to see what they release next.

Angus and Julia Stone (MySpace)

So the first hints of spring are starting to sneak out from underneath the blanket of winter and with it comes eternal optimism, a sense of accomplishment for surviving another winter and the chance of finding new love…

Actually right now I’m in Australia, which means that it’s fall, the weather is changing from a beautiful 30 degrees and sunny to days that hover around 15 with a sprinkle of rain and a cool wind from Antarctica blowing in off the ocean. The winter is looming like some sort of shadowy figure in the corner of your eye that you know is there but you cannot quite see yet. But even with winter around the corner there is still the chance for new relationships to form in the most unusual or average of situations, as these next two songs will show.

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Torngat is one of many groups, including Belle Orchestre and formerly the Arcade Fire, of which horn-player Pietro Amato is a member. This instrumental trio caught my attention back in 2007 at a show they played at Kingston’s Grad Club, where I had attended based mostly on my love of all things horn related. Despite a very intoxicated young Kingstonian lady dancing distractingly provocatively and yelling such witticisms as “Torngat? Pfft… more like TornGUT”, the show definitely was worth checking out.

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For all you recessionistas out there (people who manage to stay fashionable during the recession), here are some pumpin’ jams to put a smile on your face while you sit on your couch at home at 2:00 on a Thursday afternoon getting CNN’s advice on job-hunting.

Thunderheist will be playing Kingston tomorrow night at the Grad Club for anyone in that neck of the woods.

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RiP: A Remix Manifesto is a fairly illegal documentary about copyright and remix culture whose filmmaker is and isn’t, Brett Gaylor. Essentially, hundreds upon hundreds of copyrighted sound and picture bits have been mashed up to support and sometimes indulge the fancies of Gaylor’s thesis: Remix culture should be embraced, not restricted.

As an open source film, it has undergone (and continues to undergo) more than just revisions, but remixes of itself. These mashups are made possible and encouraged by Gaylor’s posting of the source files online. The film was first dropped in Montreal at the Festival du Nouveau Cinéma last October. Since then, I was lucky enough to snag a seat at the sneak preview (although it was a slightly different version than the official one to be released) in Vancouver this past Sunday, which ended in a half hour discussion with the filmmaker. For Torontonians, RiP will be gracing Royal Cinema on March 13th. Read more…